Screening: "Mission to Earth"

"Mission to Earth" is a good example to illustrate the features of digital cinema utilizing not only live-action footages but also other creative forms of visual images, for instance, the animation (the abstract animated graphic art) and the frames dividing sequences happening at the same time. In digital filmmaking the practioners create images and animations which have never been produced before the time of traditional cinema. With the help of technology they are promted to break the rules of traditional filmmaking by making something creative and surreal. Instead of presenting sequences one by one orderly the filmmaker of the film composed them into saparate frames along with sounds (music and the voice-over) and animations. Thus one has to follow all of the elements simultaneously. In the traditional ones most of the materials from a film are already made, for instance, scenes which must be construct before the final stage of film editing. However in "Mission to Earth", those were random footages deprived from a database. Therefore the digital visual representations replace the ones  originated from photographic lens.

It seems that in the new way of filmmaking the live-action footages no longer serve as the main element in film editing and processing. According to  "What Is Digital Cinema" an essay about digital cinema, "In digital filmmking, short footages is no longer the final point but just raw material to be manipulated in a computer..." With the development of animation, digital photography and film editing software digital filmmaking becomes accessable to people. We can make films as much creative as we like with the help pf digital devices from not being constrained to make films only using old film camera. As the same passage mentioned, "Rather than filming physical reality, it is now possible to generate film-like scenes directly in a computer with the help of 3D computer animation. Therefore, live -action footage is displaced from its role as the only possible material from which the finished film is constructed. Film editing becomes much easier to people who use computer to do the cutting and jointing of scenes or to add special effect with a snap of your fingers. In the passage, the processing becomes "as easy as arranging sequences of images in time. Both simply involve 'cut and paste.'"

The films we usually watch are structured orderly the way in which they start with a beginning, continue with events in the middle and end by a resolution of the privious events. The storyline and plot points are clearly identified without much efforts. However in "Mission to Earth" the 'plots' were attributed to the randomness of the footages from the database that pause suddenly and turn to another one so that they didn't cohere smoothly with the pace of the narrator.